"Marcus Scriven has a lip-smacking relish for the degeneracy of modern, real-life rakes," Iain Finlayson observed in the Times, reviewing Splendour & Squalor: The Disgrace and Disintegration of Three Aristocratic Dynasties. "It is perfectly OK to be reminded how often and how spectacularly the English aristocracy has squandered its luck and its lucre." "There is no particular lesson to be drawn from this quartet of misspent lives," Christopher Silvester wrote in the Daily Telegraph. "Scriven guides us through each catalogue of errors with relish and wit, but at the same time invites us to pity his subjects for the horrible failings of their parents." "Badly behaved toffs have been a gift to writers since ancient times, and in English from Chaucer to Waugh," Lewis Jones noted in the Spectator. "The trouble with the 6th and 7th Marquesses, from a reader's point of view, is that for all their crime and depravity they are fundamentally dull characters. Basil Seal had myriad faults, but he was clever, charming and funny, as English rogues should be . . . A badly behaved toff is one thing, a howling shit quite another."

"How you react to this novel depends largely on just how willing you are to dive headfirst into Jonathan Lethem's Looney Tunes version of New York life," Douglas Kennedy said in the Times, reviewing Chronic City. "My advice is: take the plunge. Yes, he can be a little too capricious and impulsive for his own narrative good . . . But Chronic City still has a Dexedrine-charged vitality that is infectious and bracing." "At times, Lethem's narrative takes on a panoramic majesty, especially when it focuses on the crumbling city," Stephen Amidon wrote in the Sunday Times. "The occasional power of Lethem's prose fails, though, to pave over the poorly connected tangle of plot and characters . . . Lethem may have set out to create a vivacious mural of a city in decay, but, in the end, he manages only to create a series of gorgeous fjords into which his people vanish." "Lethemites will eat this stuff up," Mark Kamine predicted in the Times Literary Supplement. "The uninitiated may find it artificial and overheated."

"The Museum of Innocence demands patience," James Scudamore warned in the Spectator, reviewing the new novel from Orhan Pamuk. "Its subject is the weight of a man's entire experience, and with it comes a Bosphorus of detail. Whether you sink or swim, be prepared to get wet." "Pamuk unrolls some wonderfully subtle meditations on memory and time that make The Museum of Innocence his most accomplished homage yet to his mentor: Proust," Boyd Tonkin said in the Independent. "This novel, the first Pamuk has published since he won the Nobel prize for literature in 2006, isn't the most outstanding of his bulletins from the Bosphorus," Peter Kemp wrote in the Sunday Times. "But, at its best, it adds another engrossing dimension to his continuing fictional exploration, documentation and celebration of Turkishness." "In a final dizzying self-referential flourish, the reader learns that for the past 10 years, Pamuk has been assembling a real Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, which opens this year," Jane Shilling said in the Sunday Telegraph. "In Maureen Freely's elegant translation, Pamuk's haunting novel of memory, desire and loss sets a ferociously high standard for the literary fiction of the new decade."